The Prince Buys the Castle

The Metal They Named It After

Lead was the metal Italy chose for the name of its decade, and the choice was exact: heavy, dull, poisonous, slow to shift. The years of lead lay over the country in 1975 the way low cloud lies over a factory town — lead in the air of the piazzas, lead in an economy still digesting the oil shock and the recession that came in behind it, lead in the boots of a footballing republic that kept playing, kept arguing, kept eating, because that is what Italy does when history leans on the doorbell. Above the roofs the winter sky hung low and yellow, the colour of an unwashed window; below it the placards went past the shuttered shopfronts with a slogan painted on either side. And in the middle of it, neither champion nor corpse, stood Milan: a club that had conquered Europe within living memory and could no longer conquer its own boardroom.

You must understand what Milan were in 1975, because everything that follows takes its shape from it. They were drifters — fifth in the spring, far adrift of Juventus, who counted their sixteenth scudetto while Torino's Paolo Pulici led the league's marksmen with eighteen goals and prepared, though nobody in Milan cared to hear it, the granata spring that was coming. The empire of Rocco and Rivera was memory; whatever empire came next was not yet even rumour. Between two golden ages a club has to live somewhere, and this chapter is the story of where — told, I promise, with affection, because the unlit years are where a club discovers which of its lovers are faithful.

The War Upstairs

Every unhappy club is unhappy in the boardroom first. The president was Albino Buticchi, and his war was with the one man in Milan a president cannot afford to fight: Gianni Rivera — captain, conscience, last prince of the club's great decade. The spark came off a printing press. A headline in the Corriere della Sera paired the names Rivera and Sala, floating a swap that would have sent Rivera to Turin and brought Torino's Claudio Sala the other way; and from that single line of type grew a feud of operatic proportions. Rivera stayed away from training. Milan left Rivera out. And the armband — that scrap of cloth which in Italy weighs more than most crowns — passed to Romeo Benetti, the blacksmith of the midfield, who captained the side through the closing matches of the Coppa Italia, final included, and on into the new season.

But Rivera, as his opponents forever forgot until it was too late, did not play chess only on grass. Before the year was out he had bought Buticchi's majority shareholding — the captain purchasing the club that had benched him, a plot twist a novelist would have rejected as too tidy — and installed Bruno Pardi in the president's chair. Pardi took it in the days just before Christmas — the 22nd of December, by the season's registers. The essential thing was never in dispute: by the time Milan sat down to their panettone the Buticchi era was finished, and the man who had finished it wore, or had lately worn, the number ten.

Twelve Draws in Thirty Matches

The league season that closed in May — begun on the sixth of October 1974, ended on the eighteenth of May 1975 — deserves neither hymn nor requiem, and I shall compose neither. Fifth place, thirty-six points: twelve won, twelve drawn, six lost, thirty-seven scored, twenty-two conceded. The figures draw the team from life — a defence of genuine Lombard prudence, an attack living on scraps, and twelve draws, twelve, each one a Sunday that gave the concrete terraces nothing to carry home down the steps. Italy's pools coupon offers three symbols, and Milan spent that winter camped on the middle one. Teams that draw a dozen times in thirty matches are not bad teams; they are teams that lack a reason, and Milan's reason was upstairs, at war with itself. Fifth was worth more than dignity, mind. It carried a ticket back into Europe by way of the UEFA Cup — and that ticket is the reason there is an Irish market town later in this chapter at all.

And yet the season refused to end entirely in the grey. Milan had built themselves a cup run, and cup runs are the consolation literature of unhappy leagues. The road ended in Rome, at the end of June, under a heat no Milanese entirely trusts.

Rome, the Twenty-Eighth of June

The final: Stadio Olimpico, the twenty-eighth of June 1975, Alberto Michelotti with the whistle. Fiorentina three, Milan two, and the manner of it crueller than the score. Casarsa opened from the penalty spot on fourteen minutes; Bigon answered on twenty, and the match was level and honest. Guerini restored the violet lead on fifty-four; Chiarugi hauled Milan level again on sixty-five; and then, two minutes later, with Milan's second equaliser still warm on the scoreboard, the substitute Paolo Rosi struck the goal that gave Fiorentina their fourth Coppa Italia and gave Milan a long train home.

Twice behind, twice level, and beaten within a hundred and twenty seconds of their second resurrection — there is the whole year in a single evening, if you want it neat. Benetti wore the armband that night; Rivera's shadow wore everything else. A club that finds the character to equalise twice in a final and cannot find the concentration to hold the line for two minutes afterwards is not a club short of players; it is a club short of peace. The peace, as we have seen, was being negotiated in offices, and offices keep slower clocks than referees.

The Woodcutter's Wages

Consider the squad, because in 1975 the squad itself was a statement. The courtyard had been filled the previous summer, as we have seen — a goalkeeper, two defenders and a centre-forward carried in, a German carried out — and the summer of 1975 added only Nevio Scala from Inter, Michele De Nadai from Lecco and Francesco Vincenzi from Monza: honest stock, provincial stock, the kind of shopping a club does when its money and its mind are elsewhere. What the register had produced, when the season came to be played, was a team resting on precisely two men.

Enrico Albertosi was ever-present — thirty league appearances of a possible thirty, the one fixed point in a turning year — and Egidio Calloni, the honest woodcutter of the attack, led the scoring in both seasons the calendar touched: eleven league goals in 1974-75 and seventeen in all competitions, thirteen and nineteen the year after. And there is the coincidence the previous chapter promised and would not spend: seventeen and eleven, figure for figure, comma for comma, are the very totals Luciano Chiarugi had posted in 1973-74. As if the club, dismantling one era and ordering the parts for another, had requisitioned its centre-forward by catalogue number. Football does this — it repeats its totals while changing every meaning attached to them, and the only people who notice are the ones who sat through both seasons and carry them side by side. Woodcutter I call him with tenderness and not with scorn. He chopped, he hauled, he missed what he missed and he scored what he scored, and in a house without a settled prince it was the woodcutter's wages that kept the lamps burning. Milan in those months had no plan; they had Calloni, and for two winters the difference was smaller than anybody in Milan wished to admit.

The Night of the Postmen

Europe, meanwhile, offered the UEFA Cup, and the UEFA Cup offered first a lesson in professionalism and then a lesson in humility. Everton were dispatched with an economy that flattered nobody — goalless at Goodison Park on the seventeenth of September, one-nil at San Siro on the first of October — and the draw then produced, from the flat green middle of Ireland, a name the Milanese had to look up on a map: Athlone Town, of the League of Ireland, semi-professionals, a team — as the news bulletins would have it — of postmen, butchers and bakers.

What happened at St Mel's Park on the twenty-second of October 1975 is the beating heart of Milan's year precisely because Milan did not lose it. The little ground had been hastily enlarged for the occasion, and into it pressed a crowd the chronicles count variously at nine thousand or above ten thousand — when a miracle is in the room, nobody counts soberly. Amby Fogarty, once an international for the Republic of Ireland, had prepared his part-timers to play rather than to kneel, and around the half-hour the impossible knocked: a penalty to Athlone. John Minnock placed the ball and looked up at Enrico Albertosi, Italy's World Cup goalkeeper, across twelve yards of Irish October. The kick was tame; Albertosi went down to his right and held it; and the goalless draw that followed was worth more to Athlone than most victories are worth to anyone.

The word of it, as the Athlone men delighted in recalling for decades — Eugene Davis among them — travelled all the way to the BBC's news bulletins: in Ireland, the world was told, a team of tradesmen had held the mighty Milan. It took the San Siro itself, a fortnight later, to close the argument, and even there, on the fifth of November, Athlone kept the great bowl scoreless until the sixty-third minute, when Vincenzi at last broke through and Benetti added a free-kick and a late penalty for the three-nil that settled the tie. Three-nil on aggregate, and the competition moved along to the next round. But a competition is not a memory. For a Milan stranded between the glories of Rocco and a dawn still under the horizon, Athlone was a mirror, and the reflection carried a warning: a great name carries a club a long way, and Milan's recent football had done nothing to renew it.

Trapattoni's First Winter

By then the bench had changed. Gustavo Giagnoni, who had steered the fifth-place season and begun the new one, paid for a poor start with his post, and on the second of October 1975 the club turned to a man already on the staff: Giovanni Trapattoni, entrusted with the team through to the following May, with old Nereo Rocco returning above him as technical director. Nobody at the time called it an epoch. It was housekeeping, a promotion from within, the cheapest repair available to a distracted board. It was also, as the decades would reveal with their usual slow irony, the beginning in earnest of one of the great coaching careers — the caretaker of the spring of 1974 given, at last, a season of his own — but that is another volume, and 1975 knew nothing of it. What 1975 knew was that the team began, gently, to hold its shape.

The autumn came back one result at a time. Goalless at Perugia on the fifth of October; a Bigon goal to beat Sampdoria on the twelfth; a Vincenzi equaliser at Bologna on the nineteenth; then, on the second of November, a four-nil dismantling of Ascoli, the first afternoon of the year on which San Siro stood up without being asked to. There were relapses — Juventus took their visit on the sixteenth of November by a goal to nil, Napoli won at the end of the month, Torino came to San Siro in mid-December and left two-one winners — but there were also the two results by which a Milanese winter is always judged: on the seventh of December the derby, Milan two, Inter one; and on the twenty-first a one-nil at Fiorentina, revenge for Rome taken cold and in time for Christmas.

Europe kept pace with the league's slow mending. Spartak Moscow were taken apart four-nil at San Siro on the twenty-sixth of November, and though the return — played, by one of the competition's geographical jokes, down in Sochi — was lost two-nil in December, Milan went through four-two on aggregate, and on towards a quarter-final that the spring would bring and that the next chapter must carry. As for the league Trapattoni inherited in October, it ended better than it began; the following year's pages keep that score. Nobody mistook any of it for a rebirth. It was a club learning to stand still without falling over, and after the year Milan had lived through, standing still made the papers.

The Flame at Pilot Light

So what was 1975? It was the year Milan learned that a club can be owned, captained and coached and still not led; the year the armband passed from the prince to the blacksmith while the prince quietly bought the castle; the year the woodcutter's honest goals kept the lamps burning; the year Italy's World Cup goalkeeper needed one save, in an Irish market town, to spare the club a humiliation that would have outlived everyone present. Juventus had the scudetto, Fiorentina had the cup, Torino had the league's sharpest striker and, soon enough, more than that; Milan had a war upstairs, a borrowed captain, and a young coach who began by sweeping the stairs.

And I ask the reader not to hurry past this chapter on the way to the brighter ones. A club is not made in its triumphs; triumphs are merely the days the photographs are taken. A club is made in years like this, when the board is at war and fifth place has to be carried home like shopping in the rain — and still, on a December Sunday, the terraces fill, and Inter are beaten two-one, and an old man comes back as technical director to stand behind a young one, and in a market town in the Irish midlands they begin telling their children about the night the ball did not go in. Nothing was won in 1975, and nothing essential was lost. Milan spent the year at pilot light: the flame low and blue and steady, the kind you cannot see from the street, and cannot put out by shouting at it.